


0^ \D^ *-V\s^ ^'V 



.v^ 







"o^^ 







-^ ,0 c " " " " O A. 



.V .!. 



4 O 
■a? %<^ 




•, -■^^.-^'^ .;4|C#. *-..' 



■■^'-^. 



/ 4.. 



V^ 



- .<^ 



' a^ 



^ 



. ^ 



^^0^ 




o V 




















> 




•- ^.^^'^ ■#& "^-Z • '^^■•- \y --'^-'^ "^""--^ 




N^ . 



<♦ . 




» * , ^ 

^.'^•^ \ ,s^" ^^^»'- "^^^ A^ ■ ^:" 

/ -;>Ji5>>."V.„.' ^-^v-^../ y^jmy.%^.,' ■ 




• t^ ^* .^V/h!' V i?>* .* 



"The Ride of Paul Revere" 

Response by the Rev. Charles R. Brown at 
the Banquet of the Sons of the American 
Revolution, San Francisco, Feb. 22, 1899 






To "The Sons of the American Revolution": 

Gentlemen — A few weeks after our last celebration of Washing- 
ton' s Birthday, one of the officers of our Society said to me that if 
I would get the Rev. Charles R. Brown to write out his excellent 
speech on that happy occasion, he would see that it was printed by 
the Society for distribution among its members I transmitted the 
request to Mr. Brown. As he is the possessor of a wonderful 
memory, he was able, though some weeks had elapsed, to recall 
and write out his speech. I then sent it to the gentleman who 
requested it. A few days ago he returned it with the statement 
that it had been decided not to print the speech unless the last 
three pages were left out. The reason given for the proposed muti- 
lation was that the part to be omitted contained sentiments not in 
accord with the views of a majority of the "Sons," and to publish 
that part would imply disapproval of the policy of the Government. 

I am not ready to believe that a majority of the descendants of 
Revolutionary sires are unwilling to hear what an able, patriotic, 
and devoted American has to say in respect to applying principles, 
for which our fathers fought, to the difficult problem before us. Nor 
can I believe that the sons of fathers who contended, as against 
their mother country, for their political freedom, are willing, in 
any considerable numbers, to countenance the taking away from 
another and foreign people, even though only half-civilized and 
dark of skin, that political liberty which we claim for ourselves. 
The sons of our noble sires are certainly not afraid to read the dis- 
cussions of the basic principles of our institutions, and are not 
afraid to apply them to new questions that arise. 

The Constitution of our Society declares that one of our objects 
is: "To inspire among the members and the community at large 
" a more profound reverence for the principles of the Government 
"founded by our fathers." 

Surely the discussion of those principles by earnest and able 
men is always in order. 

We all love to be amused and are attracted to an able, witty, and 
eloquent speaker. Those of us who heard Mr. Brown's speech 
were delighted with it. Not all who listened to him agreed with 
him upon the application of certain elementary principles to the 
matter in hand, but all did agree in commending the fine tone of 
the speech and the bearing of the reverend gentleman. 

Therefore, as I am unwilling that this address should be muti- 
lated or forgotten, I beg to present it to you in pamphlet form, with 
the hope that its reading will give you pleasure. I also hope that 
it may cause some of our members to pause and reflect, whether 
the principles our ancestors contended for were applicable only 
to them and their descendants, or were universal truths. Can a 
people be bought or sold without their consent? Shall we disre- 
gard the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence in our 
treatment of the Filipinos ? 

San Francisco, May ii, 1899. WARREN OLNEY. 






>4' 



THE RIDE OF PAUL REVERE." 



Mr. President and Gentlemen: I presume I owe 
the honor of this invitation to your hospitable board to-night 
partly to the fact that for four years I lived on Monument 
Square in Charlestown, just across the street from Bunker 
Hill Monument. The afternoon sun used to cast the shadow 
of the great monument across the page where I wrote or 
read at my study desk, so that if I have failed to contract 
the spirit of patriotism, it is not for lack of being properly 
' ' exposed. ' ' While residing there I heard an account of 
the battle of Bunker Hill, not from an eye-witness, — I got 
around too late for that, through no fault of mine, — but 
from the next best man. I walked about the hill and heard 
Charles Carleton Coffin, who wrote the "Boys of '76," 
the " Boys of '61," and who was war-correspondent for 
the Boston Journal during the Civil War, indicate the 
various points of interest, and give a graphic account of the 
battle. As a boy, in his father's kitchen, he had heard it 
all described by two old men who were there, and who 
fought under Warren and saw him fall. Mr. Coffin's vivid 
description seemed to people the old hill again with its 
splendid heroes, and in the quiet night-time I could look 



out from my window and almost fancy that the spirits of 
your Revolutionary sires had come back to talk over the 
wonderful results of those struggles on the very scene of 
conflict. 

But you have asked me to say something about ' ' The 
Ride of Paul Revere." He was an engraver by trade, and 
he made the plates from which the first Continental money 
was printed. He was celebrated for his many rides. He 
was the messenger who carried to Philadelphia the news of 
that memorable occasion when certain patriotic gentlemen 
made a tea-pot of Boston Harbor, and invited the codfish 
and herring of that section of the Atlantic Coast to come 
and drink tea at British expense. It was Paul Revere who 
brought the news from the Continental Congress at Phila- 
delphia to Boston, approving the action of the Sufl!blk 
Conference. Indeed, he was always " booted and spurred 
and ready to ride." 

He was a man who had traveled, not always on horse- 
back, but sometimes on foot, "neither barefoot nor shod." 
A few years ago it was my great privilege to address a body 
of brother Masons on the 17th of June, the anniversary of 
the Battle of Bunker Hill, in old Faneuil Hall, where they 
met to honor the memory of Paul Revere, one of the Past 
Grand Masters of Massachusetts. By many such observ- 
ances as these, the Sons of the Revolution in the old Bay 
State keep the hearts of our own generation warm with the 
fires of patriotism kindled more than a century ago. 

But the special ride of which I am asked to speak was 
the ride from Charlestown to Lexington and Concord ' ' on 



the eighteenth of April, 'seventy-five." On the anni- 
versary of that occasion a few years ago, the city of Boston 
celebrated the event by causing two lanterns to be hung 
again "in the belfry-tower of the Old North Church." 
And the moment the lights shone out, a man started from 
the Charlestown shore and rode through the night out to 
Medford, and on to Lexington and Concord. Families sat 
at their windows watching the road until the swift horseman 
appeared, and then, as he dashed by, told the story again 
to their wondering children. 

All these customs and observances tend to make that 
period of our national history real and inspiring to the 
growing boys and girls. I have been told that these 
realistic methods of instruction have been carried so far in 
the public schools of Boston that the following composition 
was once handed in by a promising boy. The class had 
been taught the history of the discovery of America, and 
then asked to write it up in their own language, and in their 
own way. This was one boy's effort:— 

"c'lumbus" 

'' C'lumbus was a man who knew a lot of things about the 
earth. One day the King of Spain said to him, " C'lumbus do 
you suppose you could discover America ? " "I suppose I could " 
said C'lumbus, "if you'd give me a ship." So the King of Spain 
gave C'lumbus a ship, and he sailed and sailed in the d'rection 
where he thought America was. The sailors did n't believe there 
was any such place, and one day they mutinied and wanted to 
throw C'lumbus in. But he said, "Wait till to-morrow." The 
next day the sailors came to him and said, "C'lumbus we see 
land." "Then that is America." said C'lumbus. When they got 
to the land, the shore was covered with black men. " Is this 



America," said C'lumbus? "Yes" they said " it is." "Then 
I suppose you are the niggers," said C'lumbus? " Yes we are " 
they said. And they asked him, "Are you C'lumbus?" He said 
"Yes sir I am." And then they turned to each other and said, 
" There is no help for it; we are discovered at last." 



But returning from the realism that appears in these 
youthful conceptions of history, to Paul Revere' s Ride, I 
was about to say that the whole road he covered between 
Charlestown and Lexington is holy ground. It is a sacred 
pilgrimage for any country -loving American citizen to 
traverse it to-day. It is dotted all along with memorial 
stones indicating points where the militia withstood the 
British regulars, or where some of the brave Colonists fell. 
The old Powder House, Cooper's Tavern, and the identical 
house used as a hospital after the Battle at Lexington, are 
all still standing on that famous road. 

I have been deeply interested in visiting fields where 
some of the decisive and notable battles of the world 
have been fought. I have stood on the heights at Stirling 
and looked down on the field of Bannockburn, where 
Robert Bruce won his victory for the independence of Scot- 
land; I have tramped about the field of Waterloo, where 
Wellington and the Allies fought out the principle of abso- 
lutism with Napoleon; I have toiled through the sand of 
Egypt on the field where Napoleon looked up and inspired 
his soldiers by reminding them that forty centuries looked 
down upon them; I have ridden horseback across the Plain 
of Esdraelon, the classic battle-ground of Scripture, where 
the people of Israel vanquished the idolatrous Canaanites, 



where sturdy Gideon with his illustrious three hundred 
put to flight the host of Midian, where Saul grappled 
with the Philistines, where Pompey's legions drove back 
the despairing Hebrews, and where the Moslem general, 
Saladin, brought grievous defeat to the advancing hosts oif 
Christian Crusaders. All these are notable situations, and 
the historic memories that hover about such fields are deeply 
impressive. But as a student of history, and as a lover of my 
race, I am here to say that to me there is no more sacred 
ground anywhere than that little village green at Lexing- 
ton, where fifty American patriots, drawn up under com- 
mand of Captain John Parker, faced the regiment of 
British regulars. Their leader seemed to realize the pro- 
phetic significance of their position as he uttered those ring- 
ing words, "Don't fire unless you are fired upon : but'^if 
they want war it may as well begin here." To-night we 
honor, and shall forever honor, those village patriots who 
bravely stood their ground for hberty ! 

You remember the circumstances that led up to the 
celebrated ride. The British Government had ordered the 
arrest of those two " arch- conspirators," Sam Adams and 
John Hancock. These men had been staying at the house 
of the Rev. Jonas Clark in Lexington. It always rejoices 
me to read that one of my brethren of the cloth was so 
well occupied, in thus entertaining these leaders in those 
stirring times. Troops were to be dispatched from Boston 
to arrest these two men at Lexington, and then to go on 
and destroy the military stores which the Colonists had 
been accumulating at Concord. The lines from Long- 



fellow's verse, descriptive of the situation, naturally occur 
to us all: — 

"Listen, my children, and you shall hear 
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, 
On the eighteenth of April, in 'seventy-five, — 
Hardly a man is now alive, 
Who remembers that famous day and year. 

" He said to his friend, ' If the British march 
By land or sea from the town to-night, 
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch 
Of the Old North Church, as a signal light, — 
One if by land, and two if by sea; 
And I on the opposite shore will be 
Ready to ride and spread the alarm 
Through every Middlesex village and farm. 
For the country folk to be up and to arm.' 

"Then he said, 'Good-night,' and with muffled oar 
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore, 
Just as the moon rose over the bay, 
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay. 
The Somerset, British man-of-war." 

When the signal wsls given from the church-tower, Paul 
Revere rode to Lexington, and to the house of the Rev. 
Jonas Clark, where Sam Adams and John Hancock were 
sleeping. The town was quickly aroused, and by daylight 
Captain Parker was ready with his minutemen drawn up on 
the green to receive the British. The bullet-holes made 
that day in the houses around the green are still pointed 
out, and the pistol which Pitcairn, the British officer, fired 
when he called out, ' ' Disperse, you rebels ! " is preserved 
in the town library of Lexington. 



Paul Revere pressed on to Concord, giving the alarm to 
the patriots, and they were ready to defend the munitions 
of war stored in that place. The spot where the fighting 
took place in Concord is marked now by the fine statue of 
"the Minute Man," in the act of leaving the plow, with 
his flint-lock and powder horn. The whole scene has been 
pictured in these lines of Emerson: — 

" By the rude bridge that arched the flood. 
Their flags to April's breeze unfurled, 
Here once the embattled farmers stood, 
And fired the shot heard round the world." 

What glorious days they were ! No period of our his- 
tory will more richly repay the student of those fundamental 
principles that lie at the foundation of true national great- 
ness ! As we gather around these tables to-night, and as 
our minds revert to those events, there are two points 
especially to which I desire to refer. 

In the first place, there is something splendid about the 
fact that the presence of a common foe instantly unites the 
American people. The early Colonists had their differences 
and their jealousies. The Puritans had certain ideas about 
the use of the State for the advancement of some of their 
extreme views in religion, which were anything but agreeable 
to the Dutchmen of New York. The CavaHers of Virginia 
were far more interested in fighting, and in war, than were 
the peaceful Quakers of Pennsylvania. But when the hour 
struck by the presence of a foreign foe, the various sections 
came together. With a wisdom that was truly statesman- 
like, a Virginia colonel of militia was put at the head of the 



New England troops when the hostilities began. To the tem- 
porary disappointment of John Hancock and others, George 
Washington, whose memory we have come here to honor 
to-night, became the man to lead the armies of the thirteen 
colonies, and finally to weld those colonies into a nation. 
The heart of the great American people is all right. 
They have made blunders, they have been misled by poli- 
ticians, they have been slow sometimes in recognizing the 
things that belonged to their peace, but deep down they 
have certain sentiments and convictions that are eternally 
right. A common peril brings the opposing sections 
into an effective and united line. If any one had said 
twelve months ago that General Joe Wheeler would get out 
of his sick bed to go and fight side by side with the 
Yankees under the Stars and Stripes, or that a Republican 
President would go down South and talk about the impor- 
tance of educating the negro into a useful citizen and be 
cheered to the echo, he would have been set down as a 
fool. And yet we have witnessed these very spectacles 
with unspeakable satisfaction. The North and the South 
have not always thought alike in all points of their political 
creed, and they do not think just alike now. The East 
and the West, taking them by and large, are not entirely 
of one mind touching the matter of the currency, and 
touching several other vital issues. But far down under- 
neath these differences of opinion, there is a great sense of 
unity and of loyal attachment to a common body of princi- 
ples, a great, warm American heart which beats as one, 
North, South, East, and West; and it is this that gives us 



a mighty confidence in the stabiHty of our institutions and 
the perpetuity of our national Hfe. 

The other point to which I wish to refer, is the 
essential and intelligent democracy evinced in that whole 
uprising. Every man in line on the village green at Lex- 
ington, or intrenched at Bunker Hill, knew what he was 
there for. It was no mere showy dream, born of exultant 
enthusiasm, that had carried him into the army. He could 
have analyzed his political feelings back to their constituent 
principles and have given you a reason for the hearty faith 
that was in him, making him a citizen soldier. God save 
us from the day when that shall ever be changed ! God 
save us from the day of great standing armies, of men hired 
to fight, neither knowing nor caring why, save that war is 
their trade ! 

Already, as it seems to some of us, we are in peril. I 
am not sure that this will prove to be popular talk; but I 
presume when you invite a man here, you want him to 
speak his mind honestly and frankly. I wonder how many 
of our soldiers yonder around Manila to-night, know why 
they are there shooting naked savages ! What deep 
underlying principle of political justice makes it necessary 
for them to be there at all ? I listen soberly while ministers 
of the Gospel tell us that we are doing it in the interests of 
' ' Christian civilization. ' ' I read slowly when jubilant news- 
papers speak in glowing terms about the spread of a 
"beneficent Anglo-Saxon imperialism." Perhaps I am 
old-fashioned, but I cannot make it seem right. In the 
glorious days of which we have been talking to-night, we 



fought a greater and a stronger nation, because we claimed 
the right to govern the soil on which we lived. And now, 
by a strange inversion of our ideas, we are fighting the help- 
less Filipinos, because, forsooth, they claim the same right ! 
Taxation without representation in those days was tyranny 
when applied to us. Now, by some shuffling of terms, it 
is to be called " philanthropy," and " benevolent assimila- 
tion," when applied by us to a race weaker than ourselves, 
I am forced to believe that some of the propositions put 
forward in these days as " up-to-date American doctrine," 
would be sadly confusing to such simple and orthodox old 
patriots as Sam Adams and George Washington. 

I believe that I am a good American. I am not in any 
sense " a recent arrival." My ancestors landed in James- 
town, Virginia, in 1607, and had their trunks unpacked 
and their housekeeping arrangements all in good running 
order when the Pilgrim Fathers got along in 1620. And 
we are here to stay. I do not know just how it will be with 
your posterity; but when the twentieth century shall have 
come and shall have gone, I am confident that in every city 
directory from Eastport, Maine, to San Diego, California, 
there will be pages and pages of " Browns." 

I love my country, I rejoice in her history, and I glory 
in her free institutions. For these very reasons I cannot 
but regret the hour when we seem to turn away from those 
sublime principles of self-government for ourselves and for 
the oppressed of every land, and to choose instead the 
false glitter of these ambitious dreams about " Imperial- 
ism." Whenever and however we line up American citi- 



zens to fight on behalf of any sort of plan or project that 
does not embody the idea of a government of the people, 
for the people, and by the people, exercising their own 
sovereignty over the soil where they live, we are forgetting 
those elementary principles that have made us great, and 
we are bringing confusion into what has been an orderly, 
consistent record of national progress. 

I cannot understand those men who see something grand 
in transforming our President, hitherto a plain democratic 
official, into a quasi king, wearing for the inferior races 
which we shall have conquered a crown of "beneficent 
imperialism." I cannot understand the desires of those 
who would turn away from the noble history of a people, 
homogeneous in home, in language, in allegiance to one 
religion and in loyalty to one body of democratic principles, 
governing themselves and offering a place of refuge for the 
burdened of every land, in order to enter upon the uncer- 
tain pathway of expansion into strange and threatening 
difficulties. They tell us that these old-fashioned American 
methods have made a certain " Little America," and that 
now these imported European methods will transform us 
into a "Greater America." Mr. Chairman, I cannot 
believe it. The America for which I hope and pray, is an 
America larger in size, richer in resource, more fertile in 
opportunity, more powerful as an intellectual and moral 
force in the world, than was the America of a hundred 
years ago, but at its heart eternally true to the principles of 
Paul Revere, of Sam Adams and of John Hancock, of 
Thomas Jefferson and of the immortal Washington ! 

13 



The Murdock Press, San Francisco. 



>, "o-o- ^V 









-^ '^^^^^r^ .^^ -^ 

A^ V, * « 



f^' ^:^''%'^o ^^ .^". '"^^ "" o^" 






^.-. ^oV^ 







* o „ o ' <s^ 







rT. 







.^ 



A 



■^--.'^•■/ V-^--*/ -.''•^\/ ^° 



c 



0' 










<Jy^ 














.4. 



\ 







. -6- 













4 O 
■0? %<. ^ 




-n.-o^ 






V\^ 



.^)^.' ,/~\ 










'(?!\_. 






